The morning of September 11th, 2001 began like any other for many Americans. Beneath the clear blue sky, New Yorkers made their way to work and about their daily business.

At 8:46am few people on the street below looked up to hear American Airlines Flight 11 pass over them and plunge into the North Tower of the World Trade Center between floors 93 and 99. As all eyes were on the towering inferno, no one could foresee that 17 minutes later United Airlines Flight 175 would hit the South Tower or that by 10:28am the towers would no longer be standing but reduced to 1.8 millions tons of dust, rubble and mangled pieces of steel. Or could they?

The Reflecting Pool, written and directed by Jarek Kupsc, is a docu-drama that aims to get people thinking about what really happened, not just on that morning, but in the months leading up to it and the response to it afterwards by the government and military.

It follows a Russian-American journalist, Alex Prokop (Jarek Kupsc), who is assigned by his editor, Georgia McGuire (Lisa Black) to investigate the official account of the events of 9/11. Alex’s approach is one of a sceptic and even when he teams up with Paul Copper (Joseph Culp), the father of a 9/11 victim, he is reluctant to believe that the government could have had foreknowledge of such terrible events.

As their investigation continues, what they begin to uncover paints a completely different version of events than what was published in the 9/11 Commission Report.

For starters, we have testimonies from fire fighters that were excluded from the report. These testimonies tell of underground explosions and other explosions on the upper floors of the WTC towers, sounding as if charges were being set off one by one. They don’t report anything like jet fuel pouring down the elevator shafts and igniting the building. There were, according to these ignored testimonies, little flames or smoke to be seen, just debris, until the explosions when the building started to implode on itself.

Another person Alex interviews is Alonzo (Jason Culp) who worked at a bank in the South Tower. He talks about the power outages on the weekend of September 8th and 9th. The Port Authority notified workers that power that weekend would be cut to upgrade network bandwidth for the World Trade Center computers.

By cutting power, this rendered all security cameras inoperative as well as all other security systems including ID checks. It allowed for unidentified ‘engineers’ to enter and work in the towers two days before they collapsed.

Alex also looks at the firm that provided security for the World Trade Center, the hijacked planes and Dulles International Airport, as well as the Department of Defence. The 9/11 Commission Report fails to include this along with G.W. Bush’s brother being on the company’s board of directors.

The Reflecting Pool doesn’t just look at things that were omitted from the 9/11 Commission Report, it also looks at some of the contradictions contained within it.

The design and structure of the towers is downplayed to support the theory that the collapse was caused in part by the steel cores being hollow when in fact this wasn’t the case. Alex also learns that the only thing that could have melted those steel cores is thermite which is used in controlled demolitions. This can also be used to explain why the fires at Ground Zero reached their highest temperature on September 21st while jet fuel burns off within 15 minutes.

No steel frame building has ever collapsed due to a fire, until September 11th when three skyscrapers did what they weren’t structurally supposed to do. The 9/11 Commission Report makes no mention of Building 7, the Salomon Brothers building which stood at 741 feet, or its mysterious collapse. The building also served as headquarters for the CIA and as an emergency base for Mayor Giuliani, should a terrorist attack occur in New York.

By leaseholder Larry Silverstein’s own admission in the PBS documentary America Rebuilds, Building 7 was controlled demolished:

“I remember getting a call from the fire department commander, telling me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, ‘We’ve had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it.’ And they made that decision to pull and then we watched the building collapse.”

When Silverstein was given the opportunity to clarify his remark, he said by “pull” he meant to pull the fire-fighters out of the building, but records show there were no fire-fighters in Building 7. Silverstein’s lawyers managed to convince the supreme court the that the twin towers constituted of 2 separate attacks, one for each tower and went on to collect twice the amount of insurance on a policy he had only renewed a few weeks earlier.

And that’s even before we begin looking at what hit the Pentagon, the war games, NORAD and emails detailing intelligence on an immanent attack on US soil involving hijacked planes in key cities and prominent buildings…

The full truth about the events surrounding 9/11 may never be known. There are people who want to suppress it and there are many more who simply don’t want to know or question the falsities in the official account. It’s much easier to believe these lies than to face the truth about the sacrifices our own governments are willing to make on our behalf to push forward their own agendas. In accepting these lies we’re doing half the work for them:

Jarek Kupsc, with The Reflecting Pool, provides an excellent starting point for anyone who is ready to start asking questions that for the past 11 years have been ignored, ridiculed or vilified as unpatriotic. It’s a compelling and frightening look back on a day that we saw played out live through the media, but as George Bernard Shaw once said, “All great truths begin as blasphemies…”

Patrick Samuel

The founder of Static Mass Emporium and one of its Editors in Chief is an emerging artist with a philosophy degree, working primarily with pastels and graphite pencils, but he also enjoys experimenting with water colours, acrylics, glass and oil paints.

Being on the autistic spectrum with Asperger’s Syndrome, he is stimulated by bold, contrasting colours, intricate details, multiple textures, and varying shades of light and dark. Patrick's work extends to sound and video, and when not drawing or painting, he can be found working on projects he shares online with his followers.

Patrick returned to drawing and painting after a prolonged break in December 2016 as part of his daily art therapy, and is now making the transition to being a full-time artist. As a spokesperson for autism awareness, he also gives talks and presentations on the benefits of creative therapy.

Static Mass is where he lives his passion for film and writing about it. A fan of film classics, documentaries and science fiction, Patrick prefers films with an impeccable way of storytelling that reflect on the human condition.

Jesse’s Lost Journal was conceived as my subtext writings while making Nightmare on Elm Street 2. I stay true to the film until late in the game and then bear off in a new direction, bringing Jesse up to date and letting you see he is quite alive and doing just fine...